


Nameless Comfort

by Avon7



Category: Doctor Who, The Bill
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:29:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5761288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avon7/pseuds/Avon7
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirens aren't an uncommon thing in both their worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nameless Comfort

 Sirens aren't an uncommon thing in both their worlds. She works weekend shifts in the A&E of a large teaching hospital; he is a DI in a London of worn-out housing estates and broken-up families. They meet on a wet night with sirens howling around them and flashes of blue and red light bouncing off ground and walls. She is in that state of walking tiredness where nausea swirls around you and the world has a nightmare-edged raggedness. He is stained with the blood of the victim he couldn’t save and holding fiercely onto the life of the one who remains. Sharp-edged with anger and frustration he yells at her. She bites back with a bitter fury that surprises her as she triages and treats.

 

Once the boy is receiving help, he is quiet - giving only the information that she needs. As he calms, Neil sees the tinge of grey in her skin and the way her body drags as she moves. He has lived the fatigue where you no longer remember why you are hanging on and he is there at her elbow as she stumbles. There is nothing – _nothing_ – in his flat voice to remind her of the other man who knew when she had reached her limits, but for a moment tears burn in her throat.

 

Long afterwards, when the blood has been washed from the entrance and a grey dawn brings a pale light he is still there. He sits slumped in a corridor, legs outstretched and eyes shadowed. She brings two coffees from the doctors’ lounge and sits beside him.

 

“We couldn’t have saved her.”

 

He takes the coffee and the comfort with a smile and again, jarringly, she is reminded of another man who smiled as though he believed you, while never forgiving himself.

 

“What about Jordan?”

 

She hesitates but he isn’t someone who needs or wants false comfort.

 

“He won’t walk, and there may be brain damage from the blood loss. He should live.”

 

For a while, they sit in silence and drink their coffee.

 

“He’s thirteen,” he says eventually, as though it is an explanation of everything – his anger, his continued presence, the shadows that still hang over him.

 

For a minute she thinks about how close this boy – and all of them – came to dying only months back. She thinks about all that The Doctor has lost – a whole society gone – but knows even as she does that a million deaths don’t change the tragedy of a single death. She knows too that The Doctor would mourn for this boy, and for his sister who died, even though a human life is a brief flickering of a candle’s flame to him.

 

She finds no words in the end, so clasps his arm. For a minute he stays there, warm and human under her touch, before he levers himself stiffly to his feet.

 

They walk to the door together and stand for a minute looking out at the grey scudding clouds and faint mist of rain. He turns his collar up and takes her hand.

 

“Thank you, doctor.”

 

‘Martha,” she says, but doesn’t know if he hears her as the doors swing behind him and he picks his way between slumbering ambulances towards the road.

 

She doesn’t know his name, but she knows she’ll see him again, knows that their paths lie in some way together. Perhaps you can’t travel through time without some of time’s walls becoming shadowy. Either way she knows that they will be together as surely as she knows The Doctor will come if she ever truly needs him.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Melliyna as part of a first lines meme.  
> It's unusual for me:  
> *It's a crossover and I don't do crossovers. Did one back in the days of fanzines and it froze after two chapters scarring me for life about both crossovers and multi-chapter stories. ;-)  
> *It's about Martha - and she's probably my least favourite of all the new DW companions.


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